in 1914, on the eve of world war i, philosopher Josiah Royce celebrated the utopian promise of insurance. In an address delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, Royce welcomed what he called “the coming social order of the insurer”—a new system of global governance based on the model of mutual insurance. Building on the work of fellow philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, Royce imagined on the horizon a global “community of insurance” made up of all the nations of the world.
Under this new system, Royce predicted, every nation would contribute to a large insurance pool overseen by an independent world body. The result would not only insure the peoples of the world against future disasters, natural and manmade. It would also help bring them closer together by encouraging a spirit of interdependence and mutual aid—a “genuine community of mankind” that would contribute “to peace, to loyalty, to social unity, to active charity, as no other community of interpretation has ever done.”